


Human

by LeaderPerri



Category: Kamen Rider W (Double)
Genre: AU, M/M, Robot/Human Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-07
Updated: 2014-06-07
Packaged: 2018-02-03 17:51:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1753501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeaderPerri/pseuds/LeaderPerri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Philip wants to be human for Shoutaro so badly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Human

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't posted fic in a very long time but I hope this is alright!  
> I needed to write a short story for class but I think I'm going to turn this in instead

_You’re in a familiar land with a strange boy and one day you wake up and he’s all you’ve got._

I thought he would never leave me. Ever since I found him, abandoned in the street, eyes bright as ever, smile perfectly human, I knew he loved me. That’s probably why he was left out on the street, left to rust and die. He got attached too easily. He couldn’t bear to see each of his customers leave after a night of skin on skin. I didn’t know he wasn’t flesh and blood when I took him in, all I saw was a boy, seventeen or eighteen maybe, shivering on the sidewalk as the first snowfall came down on the city.

Philip was beautiful. From his young, innocent face to his unruly black hair to his gentle, soft hands, everything about him was perfect. I should have realized somebody so flawless could not be human. There were no birthmarks, no scars on him. He was man-made perfection, crafted to be human but made of synthetic flesh and wires instead of cells and chemicals.

He was grateful to be taken in; robots like him are built to act human in every way, including our weaknesses. It was cold out that night, he knew that without warmth his internal processor would have frozen and shut down. We had entered my flat, just above my workplace, and he sat down on the couch very properly, as if he were waiting for orders.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “Make yourself at home.” So he did.

It was all small talk at first. What was his name, where was he from. That’s how I found out he was… what he was.

“I’m Philip, model wbx,” he’d replied in a cute low tenor voice, a smile on his face now that he was warm and safe. I smiled back, because who wouldn’t? I couldn’t imagine anybody who would want to throw this sweetheart out to die, because who could resist such a genuine smile? Of course, there were those who thought that the robots were inferior to humans, thought that they were equivalent to a smart-phone maybe, or any other electronic device.

But Philip, like all the other humanoids, was more. So much more. He had feelings, he had real emotions and thoughts just like any other person. I did not just believe, I _knew_. I learned about his past, where he was created (Sonozaki Experimental Engineering Co.), where he worked (at a lab, then at the Droid Brothel), and how he didn’t understand why people always left him. My heart gave out for the poor boy. 

He had gone through hell and back, abandoned time after time, and he couldn’t be bitter about it because he just didn’t understand. He didn’t know why he was sad when he was kicked out of his homes, or when his customers left in the morning. He just knew he was sad, and it had become a part of his life.

That’s the other thing about these robots. They learn. And Philip learned, but he learned that people would throw him away. Or when I’d found him, that people would pay to fuck him, then toss him. He never once shied away from my touch; he was so comfortable with having hands all over him.

As he grew accustomed to life with me, I discovered all his other little quirks. They really did build him to be a research robot, but he had never discovered his full potential. I let him research day and night, whatever he wanted. He’d never had that freedom before. He would come to me in the mornings, a smile on his face, telling me he’d learned everything there was to know about South American 20th century politics, and I couldn’t help but smile back.

Philip eventually did prove himself very useful. After his initial outburst of constant research, he began to help me with some of my own work. Being a private detective’s apprentice, the extra investigative help was immensely appreciated. Our business improved tenfold; having Philip on board was a dream come true. Philip could get paid, and I could finally afford to buy some things my flat had been sorely deprived of, like new dishes and a coffee maker. I offered to buy Philip a bed, but he said he preferred sleeping in mine next to me. And secretly, I preferred that too.

He became a part of my life so quickly, so easily. It felt natural, even if Philip himself wasn’t exactly ‘natural’, as some people told me. 

The Boss’ daughter, Akiko, adored Philip. They often went on outings for iced coffee or window shopping, although Philip more often than not brought something back for me. I kept telling him I didn’t need anything, but he insisted.

"But Shoutaro, you like it when I bring you things, right?” he said one day when I tried to refuse a hat he’d bought me. “I want you to be happy, and free things usually make you happy…”

I couldn’t be mad at that.

“But you spent your money, and you should be saving for something you want,” I’d told him. “I can buy my own things. I like spending time with you better than anything that you could ever buy me.”

At the time I hadn’t realized how deeply Philip had taken it to heart, but he’d just smiled as brightly as ever and plunked the hat down on my head.

“Keep it,” he’d said in his cute, cheerful voice. To this day I still wear it, as a reminder of him.

I wish I could say for sure when it was I fell in love with him. He had loved me from the start simply due to his programming. But as for a date and time for when we fell in love, or shared our first kiss, I cannot say. I’m sure there was a first time for when we started saying ‘I love you’ before bed each night. I’m positive that there was a time when one of asked ‘can I kiss you?’ in a shy voice, but I can’t be sure which of us said it first. There were only the nights that blurred together, a peck on the cheek or a full kiss before lying down, bodies pressed into one another. 

Philip, of course, did not need to sleep, only recharge. But he chose to put his system on standby for about seven or eight hours each night, setting an automatic timer so that we could wake together. I once told him it wasn’t necessary, that he could go research or something if he wanted after I had fallen asleep. He had looked at me with such earnest eyes that for a second I could not believe he wasn’t born a human.

“But it’s not normal,” he murmured, burying his face in my neck. “I want to sleep. I want to wake up with you. I want to have tummy aches when I eat too much, I want to… I want to be real.”

His voice cracked, and his shoulders were hunched. If he had tear ducts, I know he would have been crying. But instead all that came from him were dry sobs, so heart wrenching that I’d actually put my fingertips to his cheek to make sure they were dry. That only seemed to make him cry harder. 

Then I understood. He wanted to be human. He knew no matter how realistic he looked, acted, felt… He would never be a born human. The fact that he could not grow old or sleep frightened him. And all I could do for him was hold him and stroke his hair, so soft that nobody would have ever imagined it was synthetic.

“You are real,” I told him, trying to soothe him. “Look at me.”  
His head had lifted just a little bit, poor thing had looked absolutely pathetic. I’d cupped his face with my hands, so that he held eye contact with me.

“Can you see me?”

“Yes,” he breathed, lower lip trembling.

“Can you feel me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes,” he’d bawled, hugging me tightly.

I wasn’t able to do anything but hug him back, kissing his ear. I might not remember the first time we kissed, or the first time we promised to be with each other forever, but I remember the first night we made love. Quiet and unremarkable, in all honesty, but it meant the world to me. And probably to him, too. It felt strange, not to have to kiss tears away, but Philip was more than happy to let me cradle him and kiss my way down his face to his neck, making soft whimpering noises as I did.

There were no traces of any openings or hatches on his body when I pushed his shirt up, only smooth skin that felt so real, so human to me. The heat from his internal processor gave the same effect as my own body temperature, making his body warm to the touch. Only as I kissed down his chest did I realize—he had no heartbeat. The was one thing other than the inability to sleep that had truly given him away, but in the heat of the moment I hadn’t been thinking about that. I could only think about how perfect, how completely right he felt arching up into me, how wonderful his lips felt against mine. How he’d carded his hands through my hair as I took him into my mouth. How whelmed he’d been when I finally entered him.

I asked if that was okay, to enter him like I would any other human. He had assured me that it was alright, he’d worked as a sex droid, remember. He was built to be human, he could eat and drink and create waste. He could even orgasm, which had excited me to the point where I was grinning in the middle of our first time. Just no sleeping or crying. No heartbeat. Little things, but if Philip could love me and I could love him, did they even really matter?

After that first night, there were countless nights that followed a similar suite, full of kisses and touches. I got caught up in it all, waking up to Philip’s kisses, working hard with him and the Boss during the day, and then coming home to make dinner and make love. Those days were the happiest I had ever been; I thought they would never end.

It was only when Philip’s internal alarms didn’t wake him up in the mornings did I begin to suspect there was anything going on. He had said it was nothing, that sometimes it happens, and he could get it inspected by an engineer later. I trusted his judgment, and left it at that. What I didn’t understand until too late were the other warning signs. He lost his ability to concentrate on research for hours and hours at a time. He took in less and less food and water. Technically, he did not need to eat or drink, but those were two of the things that made him feel human. That made him feel normal. He still ate dinner with me everyday, he still came to work and did the bulk of the research for our cases. 

But there was no more morning coffee for him. No more researching things for his own enjoyment. Even our sex was slower, but I wrote it off as him wanting to enjoy it. It never occurred to me there could be something wrong with him, because he was Philip. He was mine and he was Perfect, we were supposed to be together forever.

I wish he told me. I wish he told me that his time was running out, or I would have taken him in somewhere to get checked over. And when that would have proven ineffective, I would have devoted what little time we had left to being there for him the entire time. I would have kissed him harder, hugged him tighter, told him ‘I love you’ a few more times a day. I wouldn’t have checked in the backroom of the detective’s agency to find him seizing up, to find him having trouble speaking and walking. I’d run up to him, helping him up and steadying him until he could finally function again.

“What happened?” I had asked, heart hammering so wildly I thought I was going to crack a rib. “Are you okay?”

He’d looked at me with the saddest gaze he’d ever given me. I had never seen him look like that before, not even when he had doubts about his humanness.

"I’m dying,” he whispered, touching my face carefully. It had seemed like the effort was taking him everything he had. “I thought I would be okay, that I could fix myself if I gave some parts of myself a rest…”

I stood holding him, dumbfounded. That had been why he stopped eating and drinking unless he had to. Why our sex was slower. He had been trying to clean out his system and give his body a rest in hopes that he could fix himself. But no amount of abstinence of ‘human’ qualities would fix a broken system. He probably had been in need of engineer assistance for weeks, but I hadn’t noticed all this time.

Of course I tried to protest. I had savings put away for a motorbike, but I would have easily spent the money on the best engineer I could find if it meant Philip would have been okay. But he seemed set on the idea that I shouldn’t call, that I shouldn’t try to get help for him. And of course, I didn’t listen.

“Akiko!” I’d called, dragging Philip out of the backroom. “We’re going upstairs to my place, tell Boss that we need the afternoon off. Philip’s having a… a bit of a malfunction.”

She’d nodded and flashed me a thumbs up. I could barely keep it together, the panic rising in my throat so fast that I thought I would choke on it. I managed to get him to our room and onto the bed, laying him down as gently as I could. My tears were coming down hard and fast, making it difficult to read the phone numbers of humanoid engineers in the city I pulled up on the laptop. Philip had attempted to stop me, and looking back, I don’t blame him. He had been trying to save me from phone call after phone call, of engineers saying ‘sorry, but that model is no longer in production. We cannot fix him.’ I called his manufacturing company last, in hopes that they would have some replacement parts for him. But they too had said they no longer carried parts for his model, and the technology to fix him was now obsolete. The only way to have gotten him fixed was to find another droid in a similar model and entirely replace his body and transfer his hard drive, but they were expensive. Too expensive for me to buy, even with our combined savings. 

My cell phone had cracked when it hit the floor, thrown down in frustration. Philip whimpered from the bed, and a fresh wave of tears took hold of me. I crawled into bed with him, and he curled up in my arms, shaking a little. Even now I’m not if it was because he was crying or if it was just more spasms due to his system malfunctioning. I held him as close as possible, kissing his face as many times as physically possible. His face was wet with my tears, making it look like he too had water spilling from his eyes. He was as beautiful as ever, even if his sobs were occasionally interrupted by another spasm.

“Shoutaro?” he said softly. I forced myself to be quiet so that I could hear his voice, in case I never did again.

“I’ve got you,” I mumbled, kissing his forehead. “I’ve got you.”

“I know,” he sighed, leaning into me. I think I had only been babbling on to calm myself down more than him; he’d known this was coming for a while.

“I don’t want to ask this of you,” he wheezed after a moment. “But I don’t want you to see me die.”

“What do you mean?” I’d asked him. Of course I would see him die, I had vowed to see him through until the end, whenever the end was.

“Well, you’ll see me die,” he amended. “But I don’t want you to keep finding me malfunctioning like today. I don’t want you to wake up one day and not be able to have me turn on.”

I didn’t understand what he was asking of me. My entire life, I thought that would be the easiest way to go. In one’s sleep, peacefully. Sure, it might not be heroic or tragic, but it is the most painless. I told him this, but he shook his head.

“I’ll just keep getting worse,” he whispered. “There’s... There’s a sensor on my chest. A-and a string of code words that will turn me off. I want you to turn me off. I want you to remember me like this, still able to speak and love you. I don’t want my systems to crash and my memories to get wiped. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll even find a replacement body for me, and I can be yours again.”

I was barely hearing what he was saying, the blood in my ears had been deafening.

“What if I don’t find another body?” I asked, afraid of hearing an answer I already knew.

“Then remember me and honour me,” he replied. “Live your life. Go on adventures. Protect Boss and Akiko and make sure all the work gets done, even without me. Maybe you’ll even find somebody else to love--”

“NO!” I’d cried, covering his mouth so forcefully that I had almost shoved my fist in there.

“I mean,” I said shakily, taking my hand away. “I’ll never find anybody else like you. I know I won’t. I promise not to forget you, I promise I’ll bring you back. Please… I don’t want to kill you.”

“You’re not killing me,” he’d insisted. His face was so genuine, so gentle that I cannot bear to think about it without crying even now, almost a year later. “You’re letting me go. If you love something, let it go, right?”

“Don’t fucking pull that on me,” I’d told him. “Don’t fucking pull that on me, you know it’ll still be me turning you off.”

“Please.” God, why had he convinced me to turn him off? I should have figured out a way to save him. “That is my last wish. Turn me off tonight, so my system won’t get permanently damaged.”

I nodded in defeat, that had been nothing I could say that would have made him change his mind. And he was right, if there was a chance of saving him, his internal core would have needed to be in good condition.

“Fine,” I’d said. “Will you kiss me once more then? Tell me you love me. That’s not too much to ask, is it?”

Philip had smiled at me, trying his hardest to keep the mood light.

“I’ll do you one better,” he promised.

We made love for the last time that afternoon. It was slow and bittersweet, yet an hour never passed by so quickly. We lay naked in bed together, Philip cuddled up to me as if it were any other time we’d had sex.

“Will you get me a piece of paper and a pen?” he asked, finally breaking the silence. I got it for him, trying to be slow about it. He had scribbled down some seemingly random words for me, and I swallowed hard as I read them over. He lay down and placed my hand carefully on his chest.

“Press down when you say the words, and say the words nice and clear,” he instructed, calm as ever. I was a wreck, I regret that Philip’s last memories of me were my snot-covered face and blood-shot, teary eyes. But he still leaned up to give me one more kiss, one that was not nearly as long as it should have been.

“Rider,” I’d said. “Extreme. Joker. Cyclone. Metal. Trigger. Luna. Heat. Fang.”

I held his gaze the entire time. As I spoke the last word, I thought I saw a flash of fear in his eyes, but then he was gone. The light in his eyes died, his body became stiff, and eventually, he became cold to the touch. I don’t think I moved from that bed the entire afternoon, hell, I probably didn’t even get dressed until night fell. I lay next to him, our bodies still unclothed, but his was no longer warm. He felt like a very soft mannequin, and I cried into his hair until my tears ran dry.

I never bothered dressing him. To this day, he’s still in my flat, wrapped up in the sheets from my bed from that afternoon. Maybe that’s weird, keeping his body in a previously unused broom closet in my flat, but I didn’t dare throw him out. I couldn’t. I still had—have—hope that he will come back one day. It’s a futile hope, hoping that one day I’ll bump into a robot of his model who will generously donate their body so that Philip may live, but it’s all I have. It’s what keeps me going everyday, what keeps my life from spiraling downwards out of control. The backroom of the detective agency has been untouched.  
Nobody, not even Boss, has ever suggested cleaning it out. There are even still some of Philip’s notes on the whiteboard there. I haven’t gone back there in a while, although the first month after his death (I only recently started calling it that) I would go in and sit in the middle of the room, trying to feel his presence. I would cry when I remembered his voice, the times we would spend in there together after work. But the day I had trouble recalling his voice was the day I stopped visiting the backroom everyday. I weaned myself off of it, letting go, as Philip might have said, but I could never forget him. I honor him every single day, still say goodnight to his side of the bed even if he can’t say goodnight to me back. I haven’t laid eyes on his body since the day he died. It would bring back too many painful memories, and I wanted to remember Philip like he wanted me to remember him. Happy. Quirky. In love. Not cold and still and lifeless.

Today is no different. I will make my morning coffee, I will go to work. Maybe I’ll visit the backroom, since I haven’t done so in a very long time. Would Philip be proud of me? I’m not sure, but I like to think so. I’ll come home and make dinner and say goodnight to Philip, and tomorrow will probably be very similar. Today I am meeting with a client, her name is Wakana according to Boss. She is from Sonozaki Experimental Engineering Co, so maybe I will be able to get some information on getting Philip fixed. I can only hope. Hope has gotten me through a year. It can get me through today too.  


**Author's Note:**

> I totally stole the deactivation words concept from AI but whatever
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! There will probably be a sequel eventually


End file.
